1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to improving user experience on a network, and more specifically, to optimizing video pre-fetch in a network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, have become prevalent in recent years. Given the advances in mobile computing power and far-reaching wireless Internet access, more and more users view streamed videos on their mobile devices. There are many cases where it is desirable to have an “instant play” video experience on these mobile devices. Imagine, for example, a social media feed with embedded videos. It is common to click play and be met with long start times. As user tolerance for long start times is low, a user may quickly move on to other feeds/content when embedded videos have long start times.
To compensate for this, many applications pre-fetch the entire video before it is shown in order for it to be available as soon as the user clicks play or otherwise encounters the video (e.g., by the video appearing within a viewed portion of a display of the mobile device). The disadvantage being that pre-fetching the entire video can consume large amounts of network data. This can make it prohibitively expensive to download such data over mobile (or cellular) networks. As a consequence, these entire video pre-fetches are typically restricted to WiFi networks only.